Tings Dey Happen

Dan Hoyle tells the comic and profound story of Nigeria's oil madness in Tings Dey Happen, based on Hoyle's year in Nigeria as a Fulbright Scholar.

Media-savvy warlords, pacifist militants, Africanized Texas oilmen, and prostitutes turned anti-Chevron activists confront the audience with their stories of survival on the West African Oil Frontier. Already supplying 10% of American oil, Nigeria and its surrounding Gulf of Guinea region has been targeted as the "new Middle East" of oil security. However, militants in the oil-producing Niger Delta are blowing up pipelines, warlords are threatening rebellion, and oil company employees are being kidnapped with alarming frequency...

Tings Dey Happen comes to Culture Project after successful runs in San Francisco and at Stanford University.

“Dan Hoyle, in the tradition of Whoopi or Pryor or Leguizamo, jumps racial and physical boundaries to cross-culturally morph into dozens of sad and funny characters; creating a personal and very insightful view of a world we’d never see otherwise.”

– Robin Williams

“Dan Hoyle, equally talented as researcher and impersonator, gives us utterly convincing portraits of the Nigerians and Westerners caught up in the brutal oil fields of the Niger River Delta. This is important journalism and brilliant theater.”

– George Packer, Writer, The New Yorker

“Dan Hoyle’s show is wildly entertaining and the most nuanced and insightful treatment of the complexities of oil politics I have encountered in a decade of covering energy for The Economist.”

– Vijay Vaitheeswaran, The Economist

“Tings Dey Happen is a virtuosic piece of performing in which you very soon stop thinking about virtuosity; you just go to Nigeria.”

– Bill Irwin, TONY-award-winning Performance Artist

“Dan Hoyle is one of the next vanguard solo performers in the U.S. He is an awe-inspiring powerhouse. His Tings Dey Happen is a completely unexpected tour-de-force about an issue that is all but ignored in the world.”

“Tings Dey Happen made me laugh out loud and cry inside. Dan tells it like it is, in the language of my people.”

– Baba Ken Okulolo, Artistic Director, African Music Source

“Dan dissects the Niger Delta like an aged surgeon, exposing skeletons for all to see. Hop-scotching from one character to another, he looks at the Delta unlike many outsiders looking in: he sees more than the clichés. Dan, in Tings Dey Happen, is a genius!”

– Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo, Journalist and Author of Children of A Retired God

“It’s spellbinding, filled with voices, shaped by a rare and penetrating insight into the confluence of forces in oil politics. Leavened by rib-cracking humor, Hoyle offers a searing portrait of suffering and struggle, and also a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit. His one-man performance is as electrifying as the play is arresting. I want to shout it from the rooftops: Africans and African Americans should drop everything and go see Tings Dey Happen!”

– Professor Okey Ndibe, author of Arrows of Rain

“Tings Dey Happen does not judge anyone’s actions or lack thereof. It merely states the fact and allows one’s conscience to serve as judge.”